


she's a lady and i am just a boy (just a line without a hook)

by gay_writes_with_mac



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: 'goddammit', Angst, Dad Gil, F/M, Fluff, a gross crime scene, and about how even caring about others can be selfish, and about how love connects us all, and i just sat up and picked up my laptop, and i was thinking about the beauty of human connection, it's about the yearning, it's brightwell your honor, me trying to sleep at two am, no beta we die like men, they're in love but they don't know it yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29059935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gay_writes_with_mac/pseuds/gay_writes_with_mac
Summary: When a particularly gory case leaves Dani questioning everything she stands for, Malcolm comes after her with a cup of hot tea and some atypically heartfelt sentimentality.
Relationships: Malcolm Bright/Dani Powell
Comments: 6
Kudos: 70





	she's a lady and i am just a boy (just a line without a hook)

**Author's Note:**

> a love interest waxing poetic about the beauty of love and how we have to allow the good things in life to be what drives us instead of the terrible is something that can actually be so personal

“That’s disgusting,” JT says, his brow furrowed and the corner of his mouth turned down, eyes falling anywhere but the photos pinned to the evidence board.

He’s not wrong. On the trail of a cannibal scrambling through the sewers and eating humans raw - and according to Edrisa, alive - it’s proving to be one of the goriest cases Malcolm has ever laid eyes on. Even Edrisa had looked slightly put-off by half a raw human liver with obvious teeth marks during his last trip down to the morgue. 

“Yes.” Through a tight-lipped smile, Malcolm turns back to the evidence board. _Fascinating._ “As you can see, the remains haven’t just been eaten from - they’ve been masticated.” His hand trails over a glossy crime scene photograph of a human heart; the left ventricle reduced to nothing but a mush of chewed-up pulp and the left atrium well on its way to the same fate. “He’s savoring them. Holding them in his mouth for hours, biting through the skin...I’m thinking we might be looking at a case of rumination disorder.”

“Which is…” JT trails off intentionally, raising one eyebrow.

On the other side of the room, Dani closes her eyes tightly, her face scrunched up from stress, exhaustion, and disgust. “Please don’t say what I think you’re going to say,” she mumbles hoarsely, massaging her temples with the tips of her fingers.

“Sorry, Dani.” Malcolm turns back around, tapping the photograph of the chewed-up heart. “Rumination disorder is a behavioral disorder. It’s rare - there’s not much data available about the prevalence in adults, but it’s not common. The hallmark symptom involves food being brought up from the stomach, undigested, and rechewed to be spit out or swallowed.”

JT grimaces. “So you’re saying…”

“I’ll have Edrisa examine the organs for enzymes present in stomach acid before I can be sure,” Malcolm explains. “But I believe this heart may have been slowly chewed, swallowed, regurgitated, and brought back up for further mastication.”

Silence falls over them like a cloak, all eyes looking for anywhere to fall except upon the photographs.

Dani suddenly shoves her chair back, hard enough that it bangs the arm of the one next to it. She’s on her feet and out the door in seconds, leaving it to slam shut behind her with an ominous finality. 

From the back corner - this is JT’s case, and Gil’s been careful to give him the lead, taking a step back in the most literal sense of the word - Gil stands up. He looks older and older these days, his jet-black hair growing silverier by the case. He brings his hands together, and his eyes fall on the conference room door. 

“Well, everybody,” he says, through a forced half-smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. “On that cheery note, who’s ready for a lunch break?”

* * *

Malcolm finds Dani exactly where he thought he would - the shooting range down in the basement. She’s in the locker rooms where they keep all the guns, sitting on the cold tile floor with her knees crossed, her head tipped back against the unforgiving steel lockers and her eyes fluttering closed. If cases age Gil, they youthen Dani. Take a few too many years off her, remind him that she’s only in her twenties, that she could still be in college if she hadn’t graduated earlier to become a cop. She looks more vulnerable when she’s tired.

Malcolm silently slides over his apology - one of the two steaming cups of tea he made in the breakroom. If he’d had more time, he would have dropped by his place and picked up some of his dried leaves to make her a custom blend, but he wanted to get to her before Gil shepherded them all back into the conference room. 

She opens her eyes, slowly - they’re bloodshot, webbed in red like crimson spider-trails. A half-smile tugs at the corner of her mouth and she picks up the cup, sipping at it slowly. “I love Earl Grey.”

“I remember.” Malcolm sits down next to her, adapting the same cross-legged pose. The cold steel lockers leech the warmth from his skin. “You okay?”

It’s a stupid question - of course she isn’t - but she doesn’t treat him like it. “No,” she says softly, and it’s more honesty than he really planned or hoped he’d get from her. “I will be. Just give me a few more minutes.”

“I don’t think a few more minutes is going to help,” Malcolm probes cautiously. Extending those profiler feelers just the tiniest bit, ready to snap them back at a moment’s notice if she bristles. “It’s not just today. You haven’t been acting like...well, _you_ ever since we picked up this case.”

Dani sighs, long and soft, her hands braced around the warm cup of tea as if it can reignite the fire inside of her. One of her curls has slipped past her ear and hangs over her cheek, and there’s a sudden and strong urge to brush it back behind her ear. “I know, right? You’d think I’d never seen anything gross before.”

“To be fair, this is gross even for us.”

“But that’s not it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, everything about this case makes me want to puke, but…” Dani sucks in a deep breath and blows it out with a soft, faint whistling noise, tipping her head back so that she looks up at the ceiling. Maybe that’s easier to meet than his eyes. “It’s just...I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it.”

“Try me,” Malcolm offers gently. “Maybe I’ll figure out your point.”

“And if you don’t?”

“There’s worse things in the world than confusing me.”

“So much worse,” Dani agrees. “That’s...that’s just it, isn’t it? There’s - _people-_ ” She has a hard time with the word _people_ and Malcolm wonders if she’s struggling with this killer and humanity, trying to reconcile the two without revolting from the latter entirely. “-out there like this one, hunting and killing and eating hearts and just - I can work every day like this, come in and do the work and look at pictures that make me wanna go home and lock myself in a closet and never come out, and it’ll never be enough. There’ll always be another one. How-” She stops again, voice catching. Finally, she tries again, and the tears are thick in her throat. “Bright, how am I supposed to want to save a world that looks like this?”

“Dani.” His hand finds her arm and he squeezes down, gentle but firm. She’s skinnier than he thought she would be - he can close his hand around her forearm, feel the slender bones beneath her skin. “The world isn’t pretty. If anyone can tell you that, it’s me. There’s a lot of stuff out there like this case, the gross and the bad and the _evil_. But you can’t think about it like this. You can’t let it get into your head. It’ll drive you mad.”

Dani sniffles, just barely. “What do I get in my head instead?”

Malcolm shrugs, gently squeezing her arm. “This morning I saw a man stop and put a baby bird back in its nest. The fire department put out two dozen fires so far this week before there was a single casualty. JT’s baby learned how to smile. There’s good things all around you, Dani. And yeah, there are terrible things out there. But there’s good things too. There’s human connections. There’s joy and there’s passion and there’s love. Just because there’s evil in the world doesn’t mean the world is evil. So remember that. Get that into your head, that everywhere, all over the world, every second of every day, people are waking up and going through their days and going to sleep loving other people, and that’s something worth fighting for.”

Dani sniffles again, louder this time, and it’s easy to hear in the nearly-empty locker room. “And you think I’m in that too?”

“JT and Tally love you,” Malcolm supplies immediately. “The baby already loves you. Gil loves you. I-”

He stops himself at the very last minute, because once those words come out of his mouth, there really will be no going back. He can’t say that, not here, not now, not to Dani. Not to Dani, who’s too perfect for him, who’s got a life set up for herself already with friends and a family and a future that doesn’t need to always send her spiralling back to the past.

She’s looking up at him now, big doe eyes with long lashes, wide with confusion and damp with tears and sparkling with a little bit of something - is that longing? Could it be longing in those hazelnut eyes?

She’s close to him too, he realizes. Closer than he thought, and her lips are pursed ever so slightly, and she gets even closer and a single tear trickles down her cheek-

The door slams open with a bang and they startle apart as one. Gil stands in the entryway, one eyebrow arched with suspicion, arms folded sternly.

“Come on, you two.” His gaze flickers back and forth between them, fond but unyielding. “We’ve been looking for you. Time to get back to work.”

_Of course it is._

Malcolm scrambles to his feet and offers Dani a hand to help her up, and she takes it. Her grip is feather-light on him, as if she’s scared of breaking him. And then she’s on her feet and the warm of her touch is gone.

But she’s still carrying the cup of tea he made for her as she makes her way up the stairs.


End file.
